Re: Fast.co.uk FTTC

I have been with Fast for about 2 or three years now. I have been very happy with them.

Excellent customer service and the product quality is great. I can think of few other places where I would get an instant response to an e-mail enquiry at 9am on a Sunday morning!

That said, I can't say the same for BT as my phone line provider; I'm having trouble with my phone line which is affecting my FTTC broadband. First port of call was Fast who have checked and done everything they can before I had to face BT. Suffuice to say that it looks like being a long road ahead filled with call centre scripts and statements that "there is nothing wrong with your line, so it's not our problem".

Re: Fast.co.uk FTTC

That said, I can't say the same for BT as my phone line provider; I'm having trouble with my phone line which is affecting my FTTC broadband. First port of call was Fast who have checked and done everything they can before I had to face BT. Suffuice to say that it looks like being a long road ahead filled with call centre scripts and statements that "there is nothing wrong with your line, so it's not our problem".

What exactly is being experienced?
How is this affecting your FTTC connection?

Re: Fast.co.uk FTTC

Sorry, I am jumping ahead a bit and was planning to post about this separately if I don't get any joy.

On Saturday afternoon, my broadband dropped out. I reset my Wireless router and the BT modem with no joy. It randomly reconnected some time later but dropped off again. I was going away for the night so I powered everything down until Sunday morning.

Sunday morning; powered everything up and the modem wouldn't even frame with the DSL line. I e-mailed Fast (from my mobile) and they checked everything as far as they could when the broadband sprung back into life.

It worked for a while until my wife used the landline (which we hadn't done until this point). Line was very noisy with a lot of static noise and seconds later, the broadband dropped out. Played a little dancing game throughout the day trying different combinations but there seems to be no obvious pattern other than that it definitely drops every time the (now noisy) phone line is used. However, it also drops of its own accord. From what my wife tells me, it doesn't appear to have worked all day today.

I'm coming to the conclusion that it is likely to be one of two things; either the modem is faulty or that there is a problem with the master socket / pole / cabinet / line. Obviously it could be something else but those are my best guesses.

I tried BT linechecker on line at work today but it wouldn't work, telling me to call. I called BT from work and went through the flowchart with call centre bod. She 'tested' the line and showed no fault. At this point, our call was disconnected for some reason and I have been waiting for her to call back (as she said she would if our line dropped) while getting on with work here. That was 2 hours ago and it's now time for me to go home so a bit more tinkering I feel.

Re: Fast.co.uk FTTC

call bt, advise them you have done a quiet line test, can hear noise, and you want to report a fault to the VOICE line.
They should investigate, send engineers if need be, and hopefully/maybe, this will fix your fttc problem too.

Re: Fast.co.uk FTTC

I called BT on Monday night and spoke to a less robotic human than my first attempt. We went through all the tests again, nothing showing up as wrong but he admitted that noisy lines don't normally show up on their remote line tests.

However, with the threat of a £130 if the problem was found not to be with BT's side of things, I wanted to be sure. I spent the rest of Monday evening obsessively testing every possible combination and even filming the process a little demonstrating the noise just in case it suddenly disappeared when an engineer came round!

Tuesday morning, I called again, booked an engineer for between 1 - 6pm the next day (ie, today, Wednesday). Last night I got home late and my wife informed me that the line had been clean all evening with broadband working, etc! Too late to call off the engineer, I try to replicate the fault but it just flawlessly works until I give up at around 1am, at which point, brodaband drops, I pick up the phone, and there is my noise again!

I got home just before 1 to find BT engineer up the pole on my street; he had arrived an hour early so started investigating from outside, heard the noise instantly and got to work up the pole where he found a nicked wire which was most likely the cause.

Engineer was very friendly, helpful and tidied up some of the not so great work his predecessor had done. All tested now and everything seems hunky dory - clean line and Broadband working nicely.

Re: Fast.co.uk FTTC

My FTTC service with Fast was installed on Wednesday morning first thing. The BT engineer didn't test anything as I'm not his customer. I had no upload capability and a rather flakely download speed, but the Fast people were very accommodating and we agreed that I should disconnect everything over lunch and lo and behold it was working properly when I returned.

I have the 45GB plan with 10GB upload (I run several websites on 2 servers in the US). I was attracted by the price and no limit to uploads, plus no port blocking or bandwidth shaping.

I was also getting fantastic speed test figures - 38Mbs down and 8 Mbs up compared to my awful ADSL service with Eclipse (up and down like a yoyo and only 0.6Mbs up and 3.8Mbs down, and slower than when we started with them 4 years ago). Eclipse were also very uncompetitive with price on FTTC.

Everything sounds great, but I have now struck a potentially serious problem. I can't get decent playback performance from YouTube. I can upload videos to YouTube at full speed (1MB a second) but watching any HD (720p or 1080p) content on YouTube is blighted badly by buffering interruptions. At first Fast reckoned this was normal, but I was getting better YouTube streaming off my phone's broadband and at home I had no problem with our 20Mbs Virgin cable service.

I'm getting a bit nervous that Fast don't have a solution. They tried some things at their end today and asked me to reset the modem, but it made no difference.

I don't have obvious problems apart from this and I can watch HD videos on other sites like Vimeo without problems. It's all a bit of a mystery really.

And my speed test results today have sagged, down to 22Mbs and 5Mbs up, which is slower than I was told to expect originally (27 and 6).